Atopias

Excluded Middle ◽

Living Being

Atopias argues for a transcendence that is a relation between thought and the world, rather than an object or a substance that escapes the world. In doing so, Atopies intervenes within the fields of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, as well as classical philosophy, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, ecology, and global studies. The book posits that existence must be thought prior to being. Neyrat’s radical existentialism becomes the basis for a new theory of being, understood as the self-differentiation of the existent. Such self-differentiation, or spacing, is fundamentally different than the “Grand Divides” that postructuralist theories have critiqued. The first part of the book develops a critique of saturated immanence, or a world that attempts to immunize itself by rejecting forms of transcendence. From here the book turns to an internal divergence at the heart of philosophy, offering a new reading of Socrates. The second part of the book is a theory of the “trans-ject,” or an existing living being that is formed from the outside. The third section of the book examines the creation of metaphysical propositions through the transgression of the law of the excluded middle. Elaborating a politics of existence, Atopias calls us to defend the eccentricity of the living against that which prevents the living from existing.

A feeling for things: objects, affects, mimesis

Critical Theory and Feeling ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781526105707.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Simon Mussell

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

Film Theory ◽

Object Oriented ◽

Frankfurt School ◽

The Other ◽

Speculative Realism ◽

The World ◽

Crucial Part

Chapter 3 looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory’s engagement with the world of objects. The chapter begins by outlining the recent upsurge in theoretical writing on objects/things, especially within the much-hyped field of ‘object-oriented ontology’ or ‘speculative realism’. After drawing attention to the major social and political deficiencies of these contemporary approaches to objects, the chapter offers an account of early critical theory that draws out a more philosophically viable and socio-politically engaged orientation toward the object world. To make the case, the author recovers elements of Siegfried Kracauer’s materialist film theory, before exploring two complementary concepts from Adorno’s work, namely, the preponderance of the object, and mimesis. Offering a staunch critique of Habermas’s rejection of mimesis, the chapter considers critical theory’s emphasis on a political and affective aesthetics as playing a crucial part in how one conceptualizes and experiences objects. As a result, a key distinction is drawn between today’s avowedly post-critical, non-humanist ontologists on one side, and the critical proto-humanism that motivates the early Frankfurt School on the other.

Neither Substance Nor Process I: Anti-Reductionism

Garcian Meditations ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474415910.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jon Cogburn

Keyword(s):

Continental Philosophy ◽

Object Oriented ◽

Analytic Philosophy ◽

Speculative Realism ◽

Contemporary Work ◽

Recent Trends ◽

The first chapter focuses on Garcia’s arguments against reductionism, with (i) an explanation of Garcia’s affirmation of ontological liberality, and (ii) a discussion of Garcia’s important supplementary arguments against the view that some putative entities are not things. The first few sections of the chapter contain an analysis of Garcia’s argument against what Graham Harman calls overmining and undermining. Both philosophers’ efforts are tied to contemporary work concerning reductionism in analytic philosophy. This discussion motivates (i) a brief presentation of Harman’s account of Heidegger’s “readiness-to-hand”, (ii) a discussion of capacity metaphysics, and (iii) Garcia’s differential ontology of objects. In this manner, Garcia’s central motivation and broad picture are situated with respect to recent trends in continental philosophy, particularly speculative realism and object-oriented ontology.

Bad cops and true detectives: The horror of police and the unthinkable world

Theoretical Criminology ◽

10.1177/1362480617737761 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 23 (3) ◽

pp. 355-374 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Travis Linnemann

Keyword(s):

Social Order ◽

Critical Reading ◽

Law And Order ◽

Police Power ◽

Mass Consumption ◽

Speculative Realism ◽

The Third ◽

The World ◽

The Subject ◽

Ontological Position

The first season of the HBO series True Detective has drawn attention to Eugene Thacker’s horror of philosophy trilogy and his tripartite mode of thinking of the world and the subject’s relation to it. This article is an effort to read Thacker’s speculative realism into a critique of the police power. Where the police concept is vital to sustaining the Cartesian world-for-us, a world of mass-consumption and brutal privation, the limitations, failures or absence of police might also reveal horizons of disorder—primitivism, anarchism—the world-in-itself. A critical reading of True Detective and other police stories suggests that even its most violent and corrupt forms, as inseparable from security, law and order, the police power is never beyond redemption. What is rendered unthinkable then is the third ontological position—a world-without-police—as it exposes the frailties of the present social order and the challenges of thinking outside the subject.

The Artist as Facilitator: Being present with & loving the unknown

Performance Philosophy ◽

10.21476/pp.2019.51114 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 149-157

Author(s):

Meghan Moe Beitiks

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Object Oriented ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

The Third ◽

Object-Oriented Ontology presents stark implications for the process of the artist. If all matter is alive, then all things are co-performers, and all art becomes performance. How does one work with the presence of the non-human, and what are the ethical implications of attempting to attune to its needs? Beginning with the object of a table, and considering it within both Graham Harman's discussion of "The Third Table" and the thing as a performing object, Meghan Moe Beitiks analyzes the presence of the non-human in performance and asserts a need for awareness, consideration and love in the creative process.

Spekulatywny zwrot czy powrót do źródeł? O „kwartetach” Martina Heideggera i Grahama Harmana

Przestrzenie Teorii ◽

10.14746/pt.2020.34.11 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Artur Żywiołek

Keyword(s):

21St Century ◽

Basic Problem ◽

Edmund Husserl ◽

Scientific Research ◽

Object Oriented ◽

Bruno Latour ◽

Speculative Realism ◽

Theory Of Everything ◽

The article contains reflections on the “speculative realism”, a direction in 21st century philosophy initiated by Graham Harman, whose books (The Quadruple Object, Object-Oriented Ontology. A New Theory of Everything) continue and process Martin Heidegger’s concept of “the quadruple” (das Geviert), and they also use the ideas of such thinkers as Edmund Husserl and Bruno Latour. The basic problem formulated in this text arises from the following questions: is speculative realism another turn in scientific research, or rather a return to those sources of thinking that take into account the complexity and the irreducibility of reality to any metaphysical instance? What is the role of the “speculative turn” in cultural studies, in various interpretative practices?

Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy

Stasis ◽

10.33280/2310-3817-21-11-1-181-207 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 181-207

Author(s):

Bronislaw Szerszynski

Keyword(s):

Object Oriented ◽

Human Experience ◽

Inner Life ◽

The World ◽

Speculative Thought

In this paper I make a case for a philosophy of continuous matter, in dialogue with object-oriented ontology. A continuous-matter philosophy is one that focuses not on the identity, properties, and relations of discrete, countable objects, but on the nature of extended substances, both in relation to human experience and in terms of their own “inner life.” I explore why and under what conditions humans might perceive the world as objects or as continuous substances, and the language that humans use for talking about both. I argue that approaching the world as continua requires the foregrounding of concepts that emphasize the immanent (internal to a region of space), the inclusive (with contrasting properties coexisting in the same substance), the gradual (manifesting differentially at different points), and the generative or virtual (involving the constant production of form and new gradients). I suggest that starting philosophy from continuous matter rather than objects also has wider implications for speculative thought

Encountering Worlds: Performing In/As Philosophy in the Ecological Age

Performance Philosophy ◽

10.21476/pp.2015.1114 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 195

Author(s):

João Florêncio

Keyword(s):

Human Activity ◽

Object Oriented ◽

Terrestrial Ecosystems ◽

The Core ◽

Nature And Culture ◽

The World ◽

Definition Of ◽

The Impact ◽

Geological Formations

Within the context of the ‘Anthropocene’, the current geological epoch marked by the impact of human activity on terrestrial ecosystems and geological formations, this article considers the ways in which the ecological blurring of boundaries between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ might affect existing ontologies of performance. Departing from Richard Bauman’s definition of performance as both communication and enactment, we will use the postulates of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology to speculate on what performance might mean beyond the human/nonhuman divide. Ultimately, it will be claimed, performance, understood as both enactment and unveiling, is at the core of all encounters between all bodies and irrespective of their perceived nature. As a result, the world must once again be thought as theatrum mundi, as a stage where bodies always encounter one another through the contingency of the personae they play, personae that nonetheless are unable to exhaust the full being of the bodies behind them.

After Possession

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy ◽

10.5195/jffp.2019.849 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 81-99

Author(s):

Iain MacKenzie

Keyword(s):

Object Oriented ◽

Speculative Realism ◽

Critical Tradition ◽

Ontological Position

Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object has been framed primarily as a contribution to object oriented metaphysics. In this article, I shall explicate and defend four claims that bring it closer to the modern critical tradition: 1) that Garcia’s Form and Object can be read, profitably, within the tradition of reflection upon the nature of possessions, self-possession and possessiveness; 2) that to read the book in this way is to see Garcia as the French heir to C. B. McPherson although it will be argued that what this amounts to is that while McPherson was the anti-Locke, so to speak, Garcia is the anti-Rousseau; 3) that this framing has significant consequences for our reception of Form and Object in that it can be understood as a book that not only marks a moment in debates surrounding speculative realism and object oriented ontology but that it also, and primarily, marks an important moment in debates about the encroachment of things and the culture of possession that, in part, defines modernity; 4) that there is a novel ontological position within Form and Object, one that is neither relational nor individualist, that presents a challenging account of ‘the chance and the price’ of living after possession and how to overcome the deleterious effects of contemporary consumer societies.

The Journal of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Series "Philosophy. Philosophical Peripeteias" ◽

SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM: NATURALIZATION AND VITALIZATION

10.26565/2226-0994-2018-59-3 ◽

2018 ◽

Keyword(s):

Biological Network ◽

Object Oriented ◽

Life Forms ◽

Theoretical Framework ◽

Death Drive ◽

Philosophical Naturalism ◽

Speculative Realism ◽

The Creation ◽

Digital Or

The article considers speculative posthumanism as an actual approach in researching posthuman being condition. The article examines the influences of critical posthumanism and speculative realism on speculative posthumanism and at the same time, it argues the originality of speculative posthumanism, which consists in becoming divergential life-forms and their events. Trends, which significantly impacted on critical posthumanism and became its component parts of such as deconstruction, deleuzian conception and so on are considered in the article as a background for speculative posthumanism and are naturalizing and vitalizing. For example, rhizome is understood as a biological network of wide human descendants that are appropriate to human and nonhuman traits something like a human centipede. Thus principal excess of living in its immanence is stressed and the living is been considering as a specter or plenum, which resists to any metaphysical bounds. Instead of a metaphysical vitalism is used a strategic vitalism in the context of which multiplicity is been structuring fractally or aleatory, mixing human and non-human, digital or animal and so on, traits. Therefore, the article compares philosophical naturalism and vital realism, which in object-oriented ontology context deals with even non-living entities. Acceleration and singularity in such a case imply the dissipation of intensities in the death drive movement which is understanded as a (w)holeness and plexivity from templexity to teleoplexity. Thus, a living appears as a being-nothing, the form of form, the creation of creation. The article draws a contemporary conception of posthuman in the speculative posthumanism context as an ontogically uncertain one in principal. This article will be useful for developing a theoretical framework the realizing of posthuman being.

Object-Oriented Ontology’s View of Relations: a Phenomenological Critique

Open Philosophy ◽

10.1515/opphil-2019-0040 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 566-581 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Floriana Ferro

Keyword(s):

Object Oriented ◽

Contemporary Philosophy ◽

Italian School ◽

The Third ◽

Specific Focus ◽

Phenomenological Perspective ◽

AbstractThis paper is focused on the possibility of a dialogue between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and phenomenology, a dialogue concerning the problem of objects and relations. In the first part, the author shows what is interesting in OOO from a phenomenological perspective and why it should be considered as a challenge for contemporary philosophy. The second part develops the phenomenological perspective of the author, a perspective based on Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal” phenomenology, as well as some suggestions coming from the Italian school of Gaetano Kanizsa. The third part is dedicated to the objections of the author to the OOO view regarding the separation between objects and relations: a separation which leads to Harman’s quadruple object. In the concluding portion, the author shows that, despite evident differences between phenomenological and OOO’s views of relations, OOO offers new starting points for phenomenological reflections, thanks to its specific focus on objects and its pluralistic view of reality.